He’s more of a kitten than a lion. Steele gripped the teenager’s bony shoulder. “Can I trust you with this task?”
“Of c-c-course.”
“Now, I need you to be on your A game. Alert, quick on the trigger.” Steele flexed his finger up and down. “And be a team player. No questions asked.” He eyed the young man with hard, scrutinizing eyes. “Can you promise me to do this?”
“Yes, sir,” Max snapped at him.
“Good.” Steele pierced him with his eyes. “You are going to go north with Ms. Reynolds. She is going to need your help and your protection.”
“You-you want me to leave Little Sable?” Sadness crossed Max’s youthful features like he’d been picked last in a dodgeball game.
“Yes. Gwen will be going north, and she needs someone to protect her.” She doesn’t need one, but she’s getting you. He has to believe in fighting for something. “You have good eyes and a good head on your shoulders. She will need your help. You know why this is important, right?”
“Because she’s your lady?”
“Yes, but even more so, she’s pregnant, and I will not have anything happening to her or our child. Do you understand? I wouldn’t send anyone else on something like this.”
Max blinked and smiled. “I-I do. But what about the pastor?”
They both turned to watch a single motorcycle headlight rumble down the road. Steele eyed it, knowing the omen that the two-wheeled rider carried.
Steele put a hand on his shoulder. “You leave the pastor to me.”
JOSEPH
Cheyenne Mountain Complex, CO
Joseph double tapped his finger on the tablet and a document opened up, filling the screen.
“Did she ever mention anything about a cat?” Joseph said.
Byrnes’s forehead creased in confusion. He glanced down at the laptop on his desk.
“A cat? Like Fluffy or something?” Byrnes said.
Joseph gave him a curious look and handed Byrnes the tablet. “See for yourself. This is incoherent at best.”
The colonel swiped the tablet with a finger and studied the next page. The fluorescent lights in his office were on full blast now rather than the pleasant dim reading light given off by a lamp.
The colonel had closed the door as he spoke with Joseph. He had told Joseph it was so they could concentrate on their task, but Joseph knew it was to give them a few more minutes in the case of another outbreak. To accentuate the fact, the colonel’s M9 Beretta 9mm laid on his desk, ready to be scooped up at a moment’s notice.
“The virus attacks the frontal lobe causing it to swell and bleed in the brain. It’s possible that she was experiencing hallucinations caused by her condition, forcing her mind into a loop of a childhood memory.” He looked over the tablet at Joseph.
Joseph pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “I don’t know. I can’t remember her mentioning anything about a cat.”
“Neither can I.” Brynes handed the tablet back to Joseph. “I’ll think on it. But right now, I’ve tasked Dr. Hollis and Dr. Nguyen to study the process the virus is going through from entrance to activation within the dead cells. This thing is remarkable. Makes you wonder if God is trying to send us a message.”
“Not the message I’d hoped for,” Joseph said and eyed the colonel. “I suppose it was only a matter of time before Mother Nature turned the tables on us.”
“Or flipped them over on us.” Byrnes looked back at the laptop. “We are almost positive Mother Nature is behind this and not some bioweapon. We’ve found no biosynthetic materials or any evidence of gene splicing.”
“I’d almost rather be going up against a bioweapon. If someone can engineer it, we could probably un-engineer it pretty quick.”
Byrnes’s eyes lit up. “Could you imagine if we could control this? Basically, we could give it a limited lifespan of about twenty-four hours. We could drop it on known insurgent areas and let them eat each other alive. Next day, we roll in and clear out the rest. Bingo. Problem solved.”
The horrifying images of the outbreak in the village of Kombarka, deep within the Democratic Republic of the Congo, flashed one after another through Joseph’s mind. He gulped down stomach acid, witnessing again the terror and fear surrounding the people, hearing their screams as they were torn apart by their neighbors and loved ones. “Let’s not imagine it that way. Let’s imagine it on the endangered species list.”
“Or getting us off that list,” Byrnes said. He checked his watch. “Come on. Let’s get to the lab and check on the team.”
They suited up in their blue biohazard suits in a sterile room. Each man checked the other for breaches in his seals or punctures in his suit. After a breathing and comms test, they entered the compression chamber. White gas pushed out of the chamber and the doors rolled open.
The other doctors were already inside the lab. Dr. Hollis looked up at them as they entered. He looked like a light blue, almost ripe blueberry. Joseph nodded to him. Their suits crinkled as they walked to the other doctors. Drs. Nguyen and Desai were crowded around a plastic, covered incubation chamber. Dr. Nguyen’s gloved hands were stuck inside the chamber. The thick gloves gave him an extra layer of protection from the virus inside.
He moved liquid from one tube to another while Dr. Desai studied the liquid through a microscope that brought up the image she viewed on a flat screen nearby.
She gave him a sad smile from behind her plastic mask when he got close. “I heard about Rebecca,” she said. Her voice crackled over the comms headset, making her sound a planet away.
Joseph frowned. “She spent her every waking minute working until she turned. Some of it got a little cryptic at the end, but her contributions have been outstanding.”
“She was a top-notch physician,” Dr. Desai said. She turned back to her work. Cells danced on the screen. Joseph stood in silence for a moment. He was tired of ripping open the scab of Rebecca with the wound so fresh. The only way to keep his mind off of her was to work.
“Have there been any new developments?”
Dr. Desai pointed at the screen. “We know that the satellite virus initially uses the monkeypox as a vector but can only succeed if the cells die or the host dies. Then after the cells die, the virus goes to work. The more dead cells, the faster the transition from alive to infected dead.”
“I know, doctor. I’ve been grappling with this idea since we discovered it.”
“Well, on a good note, the satellite virus is like any virus. It holds genetic material that it implants in healthy cells. It rewires the cell’s function and puts out its own instructions. The only difference being that it waits for the cell to die before activation. Its genome is comprised of over two hundred thousand base pairs, albeit much less than a human. The problem we have is figuring out which combinations of code does what for the virus.”
“So, where’s the off switch?” Joseph said.
She glanced back up and her dark eyes gave him a disapproving look. “You know we have mapped the entire human genome over the last fifteen years, and we only understand a fraction of what gene combinations do. This testing, with limited time, will be difficult to discover. However, there is something somewhat unusual I wanted to show you.”
She hovered her cursor over an image and double-clicked it to zoom in. It focused on the part of the cell that looked like a capsid, and it inserted the viral genetic data into the cell.
“Look here.” She pointed with a blue-gloved hand at the screen. “There is a reason Primus Necrovirus started as a satellite virus. It has only managed to use a single glycoprotein on its outer membrane viral envelope to attach onto new cells. Not very efficient.”
“That’s why in the early stages it relied on the monkeypox as a vector to host cells.”
“Correct. It’s a vulnerability point. If we can modify its receptor so it cannot penetrate a cell but the body still recognizes it in dead or live cells, it will have an almost zero chance of infection. Or so I can theorize a
t this point in time.”
Almost zero. “So we have to remove the current receptor, modify it, reattach it, and test it. Without the monkeypox to assist in transmission, we can inoculate people against Primus Necrovirus without risking infection.”
“That’s correct. However, there are at least two different forms of the virus that we are seeing,” she said. She looked back at her microscope. “There could be even more.”
He nodded remembering the people in the Congo jungle. “The strain with the host virus, it needs the monkeypox virus to transfer until the host dies. Then there is the current one where the satellite virus is on its own.”
“Those are the main culprits. As far as the original virus goes, monkeypox is a relative of smallpox. If you are inoculated for smallpox, you should have a smaller chance of contracting monkeypox. The problem is, people have stopped being inoculated against smallpox because the first world is free from it. Dr. Hollis has been working on an enhancement to the smallpox vaccines. What if we blended the vaccines together? The modified protein receptor Primus Necrovirus and the enhanced smallpox vaccine. Perhaps that will do the trick. Give people full immunity to both the original variant and the mutated virus.”
“We will have to test it on people to make sure it works,” Joseph said, cringing inside his suit. People would most certainly die because of their unsubstantiated experiments. “But we don’t have a choice.”
“This will not be pleasant,” Dr. Desai said.
“I agree. This will not be pleasant,” he echoed, watching the virus dance on the screen.
GWEN
Northern Michigan
Gwen gritted her teeth to stem the flow of emotion that washed over her, ebbing and flowing like a tide. You don’t have time for tears. You have more responsibilities than tears. The steering wheel was rough and worn beneath her hands; little black flakes peeled off and stuck to her fingers and palms. The night seemed to push in on the RV from all sides, making her headlights dim. It was as if she were driving down a wooded tunnel. Her headlights, faint from age, did almost nothing to aid her.
Children sobbed in the back. The elderly sat, heads bowed, arms wrapped around the youngsters. Max sat in the pilot’s chair next to her. He nervously scanned the area outside the window, bent forward in his seat as he tried to see everything going on around them.
Anyone who was a liability in a fight was with her. Dr. Thatcher sat with his little Pomeranian, Gordon, on his lap. Gordon’s little orange head bounced from person to person, shaking with fright.
She watched the road, struggling with every mile of distance between her and Mark. I should be with him. His fight is my fight. If I can’t fight for my baby’s life, then what can I possibly fight for? She wanted to scream, laugh, shout, and giggle at the same time. Damn hormones. If my body could just pick an emotion and roll with it, I would appreciate it. Mark. Flashes of his laughing face bounced over her eyes. He did this to me.
She could see Max watching her out of the corner of her eye.
“What?” she asked.
“Are you okay, Ms. Gwen?” Max asked from the co-pilot’s seat.
“What? You don’t think I can drive this thing?” she spat. She gave him a dirty look.
“No, -no, ma’am.”
“Don’t call me ma’am. What am I, your fucking mom?”
“No, Mrs. Steele.”
She looked at him, furious. “I’m not married either, nor should I be denoted by my marital status. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” he mumbled.
“Can’t you see I’m fine?” she yelled at him. His eyes widened, and he scootched away from her in his seat. He held a .22 rifle between his legs.
“Well, Max, let’s talk you through it,” she chided. “I’m in charge of the safety of twenty-six people, most which are under the age of eight. My baby daddy, and not my husband in case you were confused, is playing George Armstrong Custer against a bunch of fanatical Jesus freaks.” She stopped, forgetting where she was going with her harangue. She held up a finger, remembering. “Oh yeah, I almost forgot. Everyone else in the world is an undead walking cannibal that will stop at nothing to kill and eat you.” She took her eyes off the road to give him the most irate of stink eyes. All confidence the teenager had disappeared, and his shoulders hunched, drooping lower than normal.
“And my hormones are making me feel a little bit-,” she was cut off.
“A little bit crazy,” Max said, his voice a fraction of a whisper.
“Crazy? Did you just call a pregnant woman crazy?” she said, her mouth hanging open. The nerve of this ingrate. This kid doesn’t know anything about anything.
“Umm,” Max dragged out. He looked like he was about to open the door and tuck and roll out onto the roadway.
“You, you little boy. You have no fucking idea what crazy looks like,” she said, swinging at him. He dodged her swipe, bending down low into the passenger side.
“I’m sorry,” he yelped.
“You’d better be, and keep your eyes peeled for infected. The last thing I need is to end up stuck in some horde.”
She checked her rearview mirror, glancing at the people in the back.
“Everything is going to be all right,” she said in her best motherly voice. The voice that came out of her was not her own. Oh, my God, I sound like my mother. The crying continued from the back.
She looked back in the mirror. The older folks looked like they were on their last leg. A few of the older women held children in their arms, whispering words of comfort. All the children cried except one.
A little blond boy sat on the far back bench. His legs didn’t touch the floor; they dangled off the seat swinging back and forth. He wore baby blue overall shorts with a white turtleneck as if someone had dressed him up for a summer picnic. It’s him. She slammed on the brakes. People cried out, startled. The inertia tugged them forward in their seats.
“What are you doing?” Max’s voice came out as a hesitant squeak.
She turned around. The space where the boy sat was empty.
“Where’s that little boy?” she cried out.
Dr. Thatcher looked around. “They’re all here,” he said. Worry crossed his fleshy face. “We have been driving nonstop since Little Sable.”
She slammed the RV into park and stood up, leaving the driver’s compartment. She stepped over young and old alike. “He was sitting there,” she said. She pointed down to an empty spot on the bench.
“Where’s the boy?” she asked everyone. The children looked scared.
“Gwen, everyone is accounted for. Everyone we started with is here,” Dr. Thatcher said. He stroked Gordon’s head with a heavy hand, making the dog’s eyes bulge out more than normal. “I’m positive.”
Gwen bent low to a little girl. Her hair was in a dirty snarled black ponytail. “Where’s the boy that was here?”
“I don’t know,” the girl said in a mousy voice.
A freckled-faced girl next to her spoke up. “There’s no boy,” she said.
Gwen thrust a finger at the empty space. “Yes, there was a boy sitting right there.” She wanted to pull her hair out. What’s happening to me? She let her hand fall on her forehead, massaging her brow.
“Ah. Ms. Gwen,” Max said from the front.
“What, Max?” she yelled back at him.
“You better come up here.”
“Can’t you wait a minute? I’m trying to figure this out.” Or am I crazy? She started counting the children and then the adults. She only got to five before Max spoke up again.
“Ms. Gwen. We should go.” She could hear him rolling the manual window down in quick circular loops.
“Just wait, Max,” she said, starting her counting over again. One. Two. Three.
A gun boomed in the vehicle making her jump. The children started to frantically scream. Her ears rang with high-pitched whines and screams.
“Goddamnit, Max!” She brought a hand up to her ears. She leaned down, looking ou
t the front of the RV. Max’s gun boomed again. A figure stumbled and fell. A figure in a mass of hundreds. The infected came and the kids cried in the back of the RV, all except the blond boy just out of reach.
STEELE
Little Sable Point, MI
The taillights of the camper disappearing down the road were seared into his mind. Steele had stood motionless for minutes after they left, watching the night as if he thought she might come back. Knowing that she went into an unknown that was plagued by the undead and riddled with death but would still be safer than staying with him at Little Sable made his insides swirl in a pool of uneasiness. Is this land even worth fighting over? If they die, you sent them to their deaths from the safety of this community with nothing but a teenage boy and a pregnant woman to fend for them. He shot air through his nose trying to relieve his stress. It’s done. She’s gone. The plan is in motion. Now you can fight this dirty war without the innocent getting in the way.
He marched to the trailer holding Peter. Margie sat in a chair outside the trailer. The older woman stood as he approached, gripping her bolt-action hunting rifle like she was going to use it to club him over the head with it.
“It’s only me, Margie,” he said softly. She relaxed a bit in the moonlight. “How about you get some rest? We’ve been at this all day. Save some of your strength for tomorrow.”
“Captain.” She exhaled a deep sigh, smiling faintly in the dark. “I’ve been through longer nights than this. Parenting isn’t a nine-to-five gig.”
Steele smiled back, lips closed covering his teeth. Her words reminded him of something he may never experience. “I’m sure it’s not, but I need to talk to our captive alone for a minute. Can you send Jason over here in about thirty?”
“I sure will, Captain. I think you did right by sending Max away with the others. He’s a good boy, but I’m not sure he’s ready for this. And the children. Sparing them this may save their souls.”
“Or I could be sending them straight to their deaths.”
Her eyes were pools of black shadowed by the night. He couldn’t tell if she blamed him, pitied him, or respected what he had done. “You made the right one,” she said, squeezing his arm on the way by.
The End Time Saga Box Set [Books 1-3] Page 106
